The
hot spot:
Anne-christine d’Adesky

Journalist, Author, AIDS activist, Community Educator,
and Filmmaker

Anne-christine d’Adesky
is an US-based journalist, novelist, documentary filmmaker,
AIDS and human rights activist. She has specialized in covering
health issues, including HIV/AIDS, since the early 1980s.
Ms. d’Adesky currently serves as Executive Director
of AIDS,
Medicines & Miracles, a national AIDS group
based in San Francisco that promotes a holistic model of AIDS
education and care. She is also the Founder and co-Executive
Director of the Women’s
Equity in Access to Care and Treatment (WE-ACTx),
a global initiative that provides HIV treatment to Rwandan
genocide survivors and advocates for women and girls to get
accelerated access to HIV treatment in poor countries.

JOURNALISM AND BOOKS

Ms. d’Adesky first reported on the AIDS epidemic in
Haiti in the mid-1980s and began focusing on the epidemic
in Africa in 1998. She recently published the first book-length
account of the global AIDS effort, “Moving
Mountains: The Race to Treat Global AIDS” (Verso, July
2004), which summarized global progress and medical challenges
in delivering universal ARV to people in resource-poor settings.

“Moving Mountains” expands on
a journalistic series she wrote for amfAR’s Treatment
Insider medical newsletter from 2000-2003. Ms. d’Adesky
has also written about HIV treatment issues for the medical
journal AIDS, and for community publications such as POZ,
the IAVI report (a newsletter of the International AIDS Vaccine
Initiative) and covers AIDS for other magazines, including
SEED, the Nation, and the Village Voice. D’Adesky also
writes for health agencies such as the World Health Organization.

In the mid-90s. Ms. D’Adesky was Senior Editor in charge
of health issues and science at OUT magazine. She launched
an HIV magazine, HIV Plus, and served as Editor in Chief for
two years. Her articles have been widely published in mainstream
and progressive outlets including The Washington Post, Chicago
Sun Times, Los Angeles Examiner, Village Voice, Interview,
MS. Magazine, San Francisco Examiner.

In July 2000, she was among the first recipients of amfAR’s
inaurugural Award of Courage for “pioneering public
information about HIV/AIDS.”

COMMUNITY ACTIVISM AND PROGRAM
INITIATIVES

Ms. d’Adesky is an active community organizer working
on the domestic and global AIDS epidemics. As Executive Director
of AIDS, Medicine & Miracles, she is committed to promoting
a long-term holistic approach to living positively with HIV.
As Co-Executive Director of WE-ACTx, she continues to provide
overall vision for the organization and is promoting treatment
literacy ad advocacy for women and girls, especially in conflict
zones of East Africa.

what
they're saying about "Moving Montains"

“MOVING
MOUNTAINS is indispensable for anyone trying to stop
the global AIDS epidemic—or who wants to learn
its searing lessons. From Haiti to Russia, India to
South Africa, d’Adesky brings her rich history
of thoughtful journalism and fierce activism to bear
on one of the most urgent questions of our age: how
to give people in poor countries the same chance to
live as people in rich ones.”Mark Schoofs, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist
for his Village Voice series on AIDS in Africa

“Anne-christine d’Adesky
links moral engagement to careful scholarship and reportage
in order to offer us the first honest accounting of
the great plague of our times. MOVING MOUNTAINS is sure
to be read by AIDS treatment activists, public health
specialists, and others engaged directly in the battles
d’Adesky describes. But surely this book should
be required reading for anyone who wants to know how
history’s largest infectious killer of young adults
could spread untrammeled across five continents. Beleaguered
humanity is lucky that d’Adesky—surely one
of the world’s most promising public intellectuals
has taken on global AIDS.”Dr. Paul Farmer, author of Pathologies of Power
and Infections and Inequalities

“MOVING MOUNTAINS provides
us with the first blueprint for systematically attacking
the myriad complex problems associated with treatment
scale-up. Once believed to be an impossible task, Anne-christine
d’Adesky not only shows us programs that work,
but also where they are not working. No person in the
field of HIV/AIDS treatment or prevention, in developed
countries or the developing world, should be without
this book. If you want to understand where we are in
the global race to treat HIV, start with MOVING MOUNTAINS.”Kevin Frost, Vice President, Clinical Research and
Prevention Programs, amfAR

“A crucial and political investigation
of the global AIDS crisis and how it impacts the most
vulnerable and invisible among us. It offers practical
solutions and grassroots victories. It sounds a cry
of the consequences that will befall us if we do not
put human life ahead of greed.”Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues.

“In July 1996, scientists announced
the first truly good news in the otherwise hideous saga
of HIV/AIDS: proof that a combination of drugs taken
daily could hold the virus at bay. It took four years
for news of the Lazarus-like reversals of death sentences
seen across America and Europe to reach remote, HIV-plagued
regions of the poor world, but once it did, all hell
broke loose. Equity is—at last–on the table:
anti-HIV drugs are about the right to life. Now Anne-christine
d'Adesky throws down the gauntlet, meticulously detailing
what it will take to turn millions of people around
the world into modern day Lazaruses. Brava!”Laurie Garrett, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist
and author of Betrayal of Trust and The Coming Plague

In 2001, Ms. d’Adesky co-organized a weeklong treatment-related
forum in Uganda called ‘Focus on Women” that was
an official satellite conference of the Global Strategies
to Prevent Mother to Child Transmission in Kampala, Uganda.
This meeting was organized with five NGOs, including SWAA-Uganda,
Hope After Rape, National Guidance and Empowerment Network,
TASO and leading treatment activists and drew over 200 women
for intensive workshops, as well as government and health
officials. The result was the launch of WTAG- The Women’s
Treatment Action Group, a nascent NGO that has worked to do
HIV outreach to rural women in several districts and refer
them to VCT and MTCT services and the government health clinics.

In 2001, Ms. d’Adesky organized an Foundation for
AIDS Research (amfAR) sponsored meeting on grassroots access
to generic AIDS drugs for community AIDS drug recycling groups,
held in conjunction with the UN Special Session on AIDS in
New York.

In July 2000, she co-organized a weeklong official satellite
forum called “Ububano Lo Mama/Women Working Together”
with several South African women’s groups and leading
activists attending the 13th International AIDS Conference
in Durban. This event attracted over 300 South African women
from local townships and led to greater networking among women’s
groups to access HIV treatment.

In the 1990s, Ms. d’Adesky worked as a volunteer and
staff member of the New York Department of Health’s
HIV hotline in the early 90s. She also worked to develop and
translate technical and treatment education materials aimed
at women, Latino and Haitian communities. She provided treatment
trainings for community health workers and facilitated treatment
workshops for NGOs. In the early 80s, Ms. D’Adesky was
a member of the activist network ACT UP, and reported on the
activities of this grassroots activist movement in the US
and abroad for community publications.

Ms. d’Adesky holds a Master Degree in Journalism from
Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, a Bachelor’s
Degree from Barnard College. She is a bilingual French speaker,
and fluent in Spanish. She also speaks Haitian Creole.